🐬 Robot dolphins are replacing live ones in aquariums and an algo just decided thousands of students' futures
🗺️ A new map to look at all the ways Americans are surveilled, yay!
The Good
A New Zealand company called Edge Innovations recently revealed a $26 million robot dolphin, which it hopes can replace live ones in aquariums. Real dolphins might not cost $26 million upfront, but Chinese aquariums are interested in the tech since the government is ending the country’s wildlife trade in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The robo-Flipper has the same weight as its real counterpart, making the swimming look remarkably like the real thing (although no article I read mentions if a jump is possible, which feels like journalism malpractice). Currently, the tech is run by a human with a remote control, but it’s not hard to imagine sensors and automation being added to a future version.
However, since it is the year 2020 and I refuse to be surprised by anything ever again, there is something off with this video. They never show the dolphin up close for long and put a distracting talking-head in the frame through most of the video. Now, it might be because the company hired a bad production team, or maybe even because they have some aspect of the robotics they aren’t happy with. Or this could be a glitchy piece of hardware that only works when you don’t look too close. We will see!
The Bad
The International Baccalaureate (IB) is a prestigious high school program offered up in thousands of schools across the world. Due to COVID-19, IB canceled the exams that account for 80 percent of a student’s scores and rolled out a bespoke algo to decide it instead.
Too bad, as Cathy O’Neil, a Bloomberg op-ed writer and the author of “Weapons of Math Destruction,” explains, every way that IB determined the grade had bias issues:
One input is graded coursework, which is flawed because some students hadn’t completed assignments when the grading plan was announced, and hence had a chance to put in more effort. Another is “expected grades” produced by teachers – who might be biased in favor of certain types of students, such as boys in math. A third is the school’s historical performance, which could hobble academic stars or be statistically meaningless for smaller schools.
Students have lost scholarships and admittance to universities over the low scores they received, and are left scrambling to figure out something new. The scale of this IB switcharoo on top of an already stressful graduation season is unprecedented, but computers are doing more grading than just IB exams.
Last year, Vice revealed how automated essay-scoring systems are responsible for millions of grades, with the biases that cropped up, including underscoring African American students. Grading these tests with real people takes time, expertise, and money, so it’s not surprising that companies would look for a shortcut. Unfortunately, the tech isn’t ready to do this, at least unsupervised.
More News
Another day, another map showing the thousands of surveillance systems that increasingly follow Americans everywhere we go.
Old Microsoft got a farm (partnership) and added AI AI AI O.
Almost 200 robot projects got deployed since the pandemic, with hospitals and nursing homes being home to the highest number of them.
Companies are turning to robot butchers as a response to coronavirus outbreaks in meat plants.
Perfect lowercase-d dystopian headline: You call Verizon. A Google bot answers. You demand a human. The human is told what to say by the bot.
Homeland security is worried that face masks are messing up its face rec tech.
Detroit now has the honor of having wrongly arrested two people because of face rec tech.
Russian activists are fighting in court over the government’s collection of protesters’ biometric data.
The cost of computing is not coming down fast enough to keep up with the bigger and bigger deep learning algos.
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Until little kids are singing a song about having a farm with some robot cows,
Jackie